Although we are still weeks away from the first Developer Preview of Android P, more details of what will be in the next major release of the platform continue to come to light. The latest is native support for iris scanning for biometric security.

A new commit points to iris identification to be supported within P, something that manufactures like Samsung have added to their devices. This change should make it much easier for manufactures to add iris security support to their devices and it should be more reliable.

The commit points to the fact that the FingerprintUnlockController will be renamed to BimoetricsUnlockController. This change is to avoid duplicate code by having two controllers and the new controller will handle both fingerprint as well as iris security support.

The commit also points out that the iris security scanning will take place as soon as the screen is turned on and will remain active until authentication happens, it is cancelled, or if the screen turns off.

While it is exciting to see this new commit for Android P, it does not mean that it will actually make it into the first Developer Preview or even into the final build. As I’ve said before, reading commits is a bit of tea leaf reading and soothsaying.

It could well be that we don’t see it until 9.1. The key takeaway is that the Android team is working on it and if the code does make it to the stable release, it could open the door for more devices to support iris scanning for unlocking devices.